UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television to Stage Reimagined A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (UCLA TFT) announced today a new production of Shakepeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set to open Friday, March 4 at UCLA TFT's Little Theater. The play, directed by UCLA TFT Visiting Associate Professor Ellen Lauren, co-artistic director of New York's SITI Company, will feature second- and third-year M.F.A. graduate acting students from the UCLA TFT Department of Theater.

Lauren's interpretation of one of the Bard's most popular comedies places Shakespeare's tale of lovers, fairies, royals and mechanicals in early 1930s California, harkening to a time when thousands migrated from the Dust Bowl states to find a new life. It was also a time of innovation and experimentation in Hollywood. For so many, hardship was alleviated by escaping into the dream like world of the darkened movie theaters.

According to Lauren, the theme of transformation runs through A Midsummer Night's Dream. "It's a complex play, one that deals with the profane and the divine, order and disorder, the romantic and the erotic," she says. "It is a play that is always relevant, always needed however many times it is performed, for it continually reminds us of the transformative and restorative power of theater."

Drawing on her Viewpoints and Suzuki background, Lauren says that this production is a rigorous one demanding deep concentration and control on the students' parts. "Young artists don't often get the opportunity to embody a scale to their acting outside of their daily lives, to create a fiction in their acting without becoming cartoonish," she says. "To understand the art of acting is to be able to be able to practice this."

Lauren is a founding member and co-artistic director of the acclaimed New York-based theater ensemble SITI Company, now in its 25th year. For 30 years, she has also been an associate artist with the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) based in Japan under the direction of Tadashi Suzuki. She has been an ongoing faculty member at The Juilliard School of Drama at Lincoln Center since 1995, and has been on the faculty of Columbia University and Fordham University in New York. She has toured and taught extensively around the world. She is a recipient of the TCG Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement, and founding member of the International Symposium on the Suzuki Method of Actor Training. Lauren has published articles in American Theater Magazine as well as in the Modern Masters series on her artistic colleague, Anne Bogart. She is currently at work on a book about her experience with SCOT and SITI entitled The Invisible Body.

Performances will take place March 4-5 and 8-12 at 8 p.m. There will also be a 2 p.m. performance on March 12. Tickets can be purchased at www.tft.ucla.edu/theatertickets.

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